Reverse engineer and cybersecurity bounty hunter log4j recently found they were getting “weirdly targeted ads” on their Samsung TV and discovered privacy breaches.
log4j posted on X that they were concerned with how specific the ads on their 2025 Samsung TV were.
The hacker even found a region-specific convolutional neural network (an AI) that tracks user behavior, citing examples like what videos the user watches, which ads are skipped, and video progress.
However, ngxson explained that their Tizen TV was already rooted and had multiple settings disabled, so an unmodified TV may behave differently.
However, Samsung TVs and Tizen aren’t the only culprits in reportedly breaching user privacy; other brands like LG have also been accused of spying on customers.